I'm approaching the halfway point in my text adventure, having resumed after taking August off (it's my crazy month). I noticed that the file size is 236.6k so far! My game is all text except for one small jpg and no sound. Is it unusual to have a game of this size, or are they not so uncommon?

I did a quick search of my hard disk for *.taf files and found the following:56% are under 100kB27% are 100kB - 200kB15% are 200Kb to 700kB2% are over 1MBThe largest .taf file I could find is 4MBThe biggest .blorb I could find with lots of pictures and sounds is 190MB !

The biggest .blorb I could find with lots of pictures and sounds is 190MB !

Wow. Could you tell me which game that is, please? I don't seem to have it in my collection, and that is something I can't allow.

I do have a "SuperPAC.blorb" that goes for 186Mb, as well as a "WorkingMan-v1.01.blorb" that's at 209Mb.

EDIT - I have five .taf games over 4mb (the 4mb one bring "Birthday.taf"). "Egg_Hunt.taf" is 7.22mb, "chasing.taf" is 7.41mb, "BANDERA.taf" is 7.87mb, "Devil_Child.taf" is 13.4mb and "Find Andy 1.taf" is 26.2mb. I'm sure these use sounds or graphics. One or two might also be AIF. Have to check sometime.

this demographics of games is interesting,something I never thought about when posting this thread. I'm really into stats. I wonder the breakup when divided into graphic adventures and purely/mostly text adventures.

My work is divided between plotting the story and enriching the world (making the characters more responsive to a variety of commands, or finding places to put hints.)

I used to keep a list on my website of the biggest games based purely on text size and not including graphics or sound (because anyone can write a 2kb game then stick 300mb of sound files in it and say "hey, my game's bigger than yours!"). My website's been down for years now but I still have most of the old files and the biggest 10 ADRIFT games, as of 2007, were:

1. 530 Consequences by David Whyld2. 525 Sophie's Adventure by David Whyld3. 377 The PK Girl by Hanadorobou4. 296 Options by David Whyld5. 241 City In Fear by David Whyld6. 231 Private Eye by David Whyld7. 215 British Fox And The Celebrity Abductions by Lucilla Frost8. 213 The Warlord, The Princess & The Bulldog by David Whyld9. 196 The Reluctant Vampire by David Whyld10. 165 O.N.N.A.F.A. by David Whyld

Peter Pears wrote:Wow. Could you tell me which game that is, please? I don't seem to have it in my collection, and that is something I can't allow. I do have a "SuperPAC.blorb" that goes for 186Mb, as well as a "WorkingMan-v1.01.blorb" that's at 209Mb.

It is SuperPAC, we probably just have different versions.Mine is 195,194,496 bytes and is dated 26-Jun-2014

ADRIFT 5 games are bigger than ADRIFT 4 games, for 2 reasons. I started writing ADRIFT 4 a long time ago, and hard drives were much smaller with space at a premium, so I made more of an effort to make the files concise, storing just the data. These were then compressed.

ADRIFT 5 games are stored in XML, which has a lot of redundant information, storing information about the structure of the data alongside the data itself, and then compressed. On top of this, ADRIFT 5 is a much bigger system and has to store a lot more information than ADRIFT 4 ever did.

The first four games all became between 31% and 48% larger while the fifth increased by 200%. The fifth game is much smaller than the others and I'm guessing most of that extra 200% file size it gained is simply extra base files in v5 that v4 didn't have. So by the look of things, v5 games are on average roughly 40% larger than v4 games.